Finding what's open

Yesterday I was deleting WSUS, not uninstalling it, but rather deleting it. I know this is bad practice, but on the particular machine, the drive that the WSUS version of MSDE was on was lost and was not replaceable. I'll probably post that here sometime soon too.

Anyways, as part of the instruction, I needed to delete a directory, but for one single file, it was apparently in use. GRRR I hate that! You never know which process is using a particular file.

Well, yes you can, you just need the tools!

Windows has a command line tool called "TaskList". Simply running the command TaskList /M {exe/dll} you can see what processes are using certain files.

In addition, if you're more of a GUI guy or gal, you can check out the handy tool called Process Explorer from SysInternals.

Just becareful what you kill. :)